{"id":298,"date":"2009-04-03T14:48:31","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T18:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/?p=298"},"modified":"2010-10-25T13:54:07","modified_gmt":"2010-10-25T17:54:07","slug":"hub-of-the-university-searching-for-harvardlife-online","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/2009\/04\/03\/hub-of-the-university-searching-for-harvardlife-online\/","title":{"rendered":"Hub of the University: Searching for HarvardLife Online"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday April 1, 2009, the cool, blue color scheme of TuftsLife.com<\/a> was tinted a more familiar shade of crimson. \u201cThat’s right, TuftsLife is now HarvardLife,\u201d announced a banner the homepage, \u201cWith the main developers involved in TuftsLife transferring to Harvard, today we completed phase one of the transition to our new home. We are excited about the potential that our new Ivy League home brings to HarvardLife.\u201d <\/p>\n

A Tufts friend alerted me to the change, and we had a good laugh over the April Fool\u2019s joke at both Tufts\u2019 and Harvard\u2019s expense. The developers did quite a thorough job with the \u201cchangeover,\u201d replacing links to Tufts webmail with Harvard\u2019s and adding Veritas crests everywhere. (Unfortunately, I didn\u2019t get to snag a screenshot before April Fool\u2019s ended. If anyone has one squirreled away, please do send it over to zhang50@fas.harvard.edu!) But it also got me puzzling, why isn\u2019t there a HarvardLife? Why don\u2019t we have such a useful site for students? Can the developers transfer over to Harvard for real? <\/p>\n

TuftsLife is so useful because it pulls together all the information you need for, well, life at Tufts: announcements, events calendar, news, dining hall menu, academic resources, bus tracker, textbook swap, carpool board, etc. The same information for Harvard, on the other hand, is spread through ten different websites and is terribly unnavigable. In my frustration, I\u2019ve consolidated all these websites as icons on a toolbar but there are still times when I\u2019m frantically clicking around finding the exact room request form I need to. TuftsLife, in contrast to the diffuse network of Harvard resources, exists as a kind of hub of student activity; for many students, it\u2019s their homepage and the announcements page is always worth a perusal. TuftsLife is also an entirely student run enterprise. <\/p>\n

So where is the heart of Harvard\u2019s online community? To be fair, I should point out there is my.harvard.edu, a portal that, in spirit, shoots for the same goals, but its clunky interface and university-wide rather than undergraduate life focus makes it an underused resource among students. When I waxed poetic to a friend about the student initiative that led to TuftsLife, a friend promptly replied, \u201cFacebook?\u201d Oh right, Facebook. Well Facebook\u2019s kind of a tricky to fit in here. For one, it\u2019s become increasingly less Harvard-centric, college-centric, or even network-centric over the past few years, as network pages have been completely phased out. It is also a primarily social network that connects you with people you already know, or at least sort of know. TuftsLife, on the other hand, is a school-wide bulletin board for student group events, marketplace exchanges, and announcements. <\/p>\n

At Harvard \u2013 in my own experience anyway \u2013 the first place you go if you want eyeballs reading is quite haphazard and crude: email. Whether it\u2019s about the German table you\u2019re organizing or the physics textbook you want to sell or the survey you need 50 people to take for your thesis, open email lists, mostly by undergraduate house<\/a> but also various student groups, are the way to go. For what it\u2019s worth, it is effective enough yet seems somewhat outdated. While there have been attempts to pull together event information, it has never reached a critical mass of users to become comprehensive, and the current events calendar<\/a> is dominated by department seminars and varsity sports games, lacking a lively addition of student group events. <\/p>\n

Computer Science 50, the introductory CS class at Harvard, has been breeding ground to many useful and amusing student projects over the years. A select few recent ones are available in an \u201capps store<\/a>,” but I am waiting a little hopefully for an ambitious student to pull everything together into sometime like TuftsLife. <\/p>\n

Aside from convenience, such a hub will go a ways toward fostering a sense of cohesiveness in the student community. In the same way that the Harvard campus lacks a physical student center, it also lacks a digital one. It\u2019s not everyone should be forced to participate, but that anyone who chooses to can. At a school of 6500 undergraduates, student life can incredibly fragmentary, and there is no central hub to find out what\u2019s going on even if you want to. So, to improving HarvardLife! <\/p>\n

Disagree? Sound off in the comments. I definitely don\u2019t speak for every Harvard undergraduate and there is undoubtedly a range of experiences here. And if there\u2019s some nifty service I\u2019m missing out on, I\u2019d be more than grateful to learn about it. <\/p>\n

-Sarah Zhang<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday April 1, 2009, the cool, blue color scheme of TuftsLife.com was tinted a more familiar shade of crimson. \u201cThat’s right, TuftsLife is now HarvardLife,\u201d announced a banner the homepage, \u201cWith the main developers involved in TuftsLife transferring to Harvard, today we completed phase one of the transition to our new home. We are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1636,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3022,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opportunities","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1636"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":429,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/digitalnatives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}